rob_667minus1
Joined: 17 Jan 2006
Posts: 2030
Location: North Wales
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| Tell a Friend Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2006 11:22 am Post subject: Benny Podda - My Idol! |
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He lives in a cave, his favourite exercise is self-flagellation and he acts as a medicine man for his local tribe. Meet Benny Podda, the worlds weirdest fitness expert (and fittest weirdness expert)
Benny Podda lives as a medicine man in the mountains of southern California. He sleeps in a cave filled with the spirits of the dead, using a rock as his pillow. He flagellates his body with a large metal stick that has 180 spokes. He can spurt blood from his nose at will. He gives every impression of being a hermit type who has spent his whole life in the forest, possibly being raised by wolves.
In fact Podda is a martial arts expert, former professional trainer and one of the fittest men i have ever seen. He's 5ft 6in (1.67m) tall and weighs 100kg, most of it apparently solid muscle - his biceps are 51cm. Before he went into the woods, Podda was a bodybuilding champ and a personal trainer to top sportsmen and movie stars. Even today, at 48, he could knock Mike Tyson into next week.
So what's he doing out here? 'Whenever I start making money and getting popular and s***,' he says, 'right away I have to f*** it up and disappear.'
The path less travelled
It takes the best part of a day to get from Los Angeles to Podda's cave, 1,800 metres up on a desolate road in the mountains of the San Bernardino National Forest. Enveloped by dark clouds, I drive up a gravel road called Paradise, and there is Podda standing in front of a small home. ‘Are you ready to leave the United States?’ he asks, ‘Welcome to the Cahuilla Nation.’
This house, on the Cahuilla Native American reservation, is a friend’s, but Podda uses it to meet patients and visitors. Behind it is the herb garden which produces his potions and medicines. He claims that his brews can heal you, kill you and reveal the secrets of every religion.
A few yards beyond this garden is the Pacific Crest Trail. This rattle-snake infested path runs from Mexico to Canada and is often used by illegal immigrants to cross into the US. ‘I’ve seen dead bodies out on this trail,’ Podda says matter-of-factly.
We reach Podda’s cave but he insists that, to enter, visitors have to go to a waterfall to be purified. If the cave ‘rejects’ you, he says, ‘your soul will be rent from your body in a spiritual tear.’ Purification may sound like a gentle process, but the frigid water pours down on you with the shocking force of a spiritual flogging.
The cave,s climate is another indication of Podda’s bizarre personality – hotter than hell in summer, freezing cold in winter. It has been inhabited for thousands of years, Podda says, and it leads to an outdoor amphitheatre. ‘The opening is a vaginal orifice,’ he explains. ‘In initiation ceremonies, Native Americans would pass through it to be “reborn” as warriors.’
Podda’s physical training is based on the philosophy of Genghis Khan. ‘He taught his troops the importance of exterior and interior training,’ he says. ‘His warriors learned how to turn themselves inside out to project their inner power like lightning.’
To demonstrate, Podda grabs his flagellating rod and whips himself as hard as he can a dozen times, striking the acupuncture meridians of the body. The thick muscles of his flesh thud with each strike. ‘You know that feeling when you’re blowing your load?’ he asks. ‘Instead of letting that go out, you reverse that whole thing. It feels like your body is on f****** FIRE! I lift weights with that energy coursing through my body and my f****** testosterone a thousand times normal – ’cause I just f***** myself.’ Then he smiles calmly. ‘see? That’s why I can hang 220lb of weight plates from my ****.’
Pittsburgh healer
Podda was born in 1957 in South Fork, a coal-mining town near Pittsburgh. His Sicilian immigrant father, Benjamino, worked the mines; his mother, Prudence, a postal worker, came from a family of bootleggers. Young Benny (he was born John but adopted his father’s name) gravitated to similarly dubious pursuits, playing dice and blackjack on street corners. He was a physically gifted adolescent, excelling in sports at high school, but his strength exploded when he started training at the McKeesport YMCA, a gym popular with criminals.
Soon Podda was roaming the back streets of Pittsburgh with an oversized body and an attitude to match. As well as hiring himself out as muscle to gangsters, he masterminded his own bizarre crimes. Once he was shot while taking part in an armed robbery, but there was nothing straightforward about the crime – he was robbing a pharmacy for painkillers, armed not with a gun but with a bow and arrow.
When Podda wasn’t causing trouble he spent hours at the Carnegie Library. He was surely the first Pittsburgh street thug to devour Faust, transfixed by Goethe’s tale of a man willing to do anything for godlike wisdom and power. He also studied Eastern religious texts, such as the Bhagavad Gita and Chinese philosophy, and was soon immersed in herbology.
Podda attended the university of Richmond in Virginia on a football scholarship, intending to study biochemistry, but found he preferred getting drunk. After he was expelled – for being ‘insane’, he says – he headed back home to become a body builder. He trained at Manion’s Gym, a rough Pittsburgh spot favored by some of the local American football team, the Steelers. It’s fair to say Podda stood out from the other gym rats. Once, to psych himself up for a lift, the ran straight through a wall – emerging in the next room in a cloud of plaster and debris. Another time, Steelers player Steve Courson was using a pay phone when Podda charged and knocked him and the wall-mounted phone across the room – with his head.
Those were just his warm-ups.
Blood Brother
Fuelled by the visualisation techniques of eastern philosophies and his homemade concoctions, Podda trained like mad – and occasionally seemed to have gone mad. The gym’s owner, Jim Manion, once saw Podda doing reps with his head wrapped in a blood-drenched towel. ‘the cable had snapped on a rowing machine and the handle had hit him on the head,’ recalls Manion. ‘He had to keep replacing the towels when they got soaked with blood. I made a guy take him to hospital, and it took 12 stiches to close the open wound.’
Podda won the National Physique Committee light-heavyweight bodybuilding championship in 1983 and did well in a string of other contests. But unlike many pro weightlifters, Podda’s heart was more in training than posing. ‘I hated competition,’ he says. ‘I loved the discipline of training for it, and I loved partying after it, but I never dug the sport or considered myself a bodybuilder.’
Podda amazed audiences with the intensity and ferocity of his posing style. Some performances saw him flexing wildly in a werewolf mask or deliberately shooting blood from his nose, a trick he learned when he was younger from playing with his ‘f***ed-up’ sinuses. But his masterpiece came at the end of a contest in New Jersey. He hung himself from the rafters and dangled motionless from the noose with his eyes closed. For five minutes people watched in silence, bewildered. Suddenly, he opened his eyes, gave everyone the finger and walked out.
‘at that point I could never top my condition,’ he explains. ‘I felt I had maxed out. I got a f***ing standing ovation, right? So I knew my s*** could lift people up.’ He was through with bodybuilding for good.
Chuck it in
Podda drifted to the west coast of the US, where he alternated working as a personal trainer with long trips in the wilderness. Despite his unpredictable nature, he managed to carve out a reputation among celebrities and professional sportsmen. At a friends gym, podda met action movie star chuck Norris. ‘I didn’t know who the f*** he was and I didn’t give a f***,’ says podda. ‘they took me to his house and we hit it off because I pounded the guy. I yelled at him, “kick me in the f***ing chest as hard as you can!” he’s like, “No, I shouldn’t.” so I berated the f***er until he did it – and didn’t budge when he did.’
In 1991, podda worked with todd Marinovich, a highly rated university quarterback who was aiming to be drafted into the NFL. ‘todd was a skinny sucked-up prick when I first met him,’ podda says. ‘but he added 50 pounds of muscle.’ Marinovich impressed scouts enough to be signed by the Los Angeles Raiders.
Word spread, and soon other NFL stars headed to Podda’s gym in California. When the Kansas city chiefs were in town, a friend asked Podda to work on the ailing hamstring of their quarterback, Joe Montana. The veteran star not only played next day but also brought Podda to Kansas city with him to train.
End of the world |
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